This disclosure relates to a method and a system to decrease measured usage license charges for diagnostic data collection.
Much of the software used on mainframe computers, minicomputers, work stations, and personal computers consists of proprietary software licensed from software vendors. Like book publishers, many software vendors retain the copyright on their products, and a software product license usually restricts the licensee's use of the product in several ways.
Certain software products may be obtained under a perpetual license, which is equivalent to buying a copy of a book. However, a software product may also be licensed based on appropriate usage metrics associated with amounts of defined computing resources utilized by the software product during execution. For example, a sorting product might be licensed based on how many sort operations the licensee uses it for. Alternatively, such software may be licensed based on the number of bytes of data sorted, on the number of records sorted, or on some combination of these factors. A product providing database inquiry capability might be licensed based on the number of inquiries performed, perhaps weighted by the complexity level of each inquiry. A product that performs a number of disparate scientific or engineering calculations might assign a charge-value for each type of calculation and base license fees on the aggregate of these values. Alternatively, the software product may instead simply keep track of the total CPU-time used in performing calculations and base licenses on this value.
The collection and capture of diagnostic data for software products is often advantageous for averting errors or unexpected results in a computing environment. Time and resources are typically spent determining the root cause of the error or unexpected result. Typically, insufficient documentation is collected on the operating systems to allow a complete diagnosis to be performed. Clients and testers are required to recreate error situations to attempt to gather additional documentation on a subsequent failure. By the time a software problem percolates up to the operating system, making itself known, the initial problem may have already disappeared from traces, making the debugging of the initial problem difficult. In contrast, First Failure Data Capture (FFDC) typically reduces corresponding Hours Per Problem (HPP) required to diagnose errors or unexpected results.
Thus, capturing diagnostic data during the initial occurrence of an error or unexpected result may be advantageous in various manners, including to prevent a user or customer of such software from spending additional time and resources to recreate the error or unexpected result. However, such diagnostic data capture results in additional computing resource usage, and may therefore result in additional monetary usage fees according to a measured usage pricing model associated with the applicable software license. Consequently, users of such software may be averse to invoking diagnostic data collection in an attempt to avoid the additional monetary usage fees associated with the resultant increased usage of computing resources. This aversion may hinder software support efforts, and often requires the customer to recreate a problem with appropriate diagnostics in place, which defeats the point of First Failure Data Capture (FFDC).
Accordingly, it is an object of the invention to provide a method and system to alleviate disincentives associated with invoking diagnostic data collection for software associated with measured usage pricing models.